The Mershon Center has a new visiting scholar: Kateřina Vráblíková, a research fellow with Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), who will be working on a project called "Protest, Hardship, and Democracy."

The project deals with the role of socioeconomic hardship for people's participation at protest. It focuses on the interaction among individual-level deprivation, macro-structural socio-economic scarcity and politicization of the crisis that opens political space for mobilization of collective grievances. To examine these topics, Vráblíková will use repeated cross-sectional surveys across democratic countries over time and case-control protest surveys.

Vráblíková is author of What Kind of Democracy? Participation, Inclusiveness and Contestation (Routledge, 2017), which examines the role of democratic institutions and political culture for political activism. She also studies Europeanization of social movements and politics in new democracies of Eastern Central Europe. She has a Ph.D. from Masaryk University in the Czech Republic.